Guest Post Series: Dennis Wilson Wise, "The New Poets of Rum-Ram-Ruf: Introduction"

Another answer to the Society's standing call for contributions, this post and those following in its series are a while in the making. It emerges from the work of Dennis Wilson Wise, a Society member and acclaimed scholar at the University of Arizona. In this post, Dr. Wise introduces his own work; accordingly, editorial intrusion is minimal.

Look for the next entry in the series soon!

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𝔒ver the last few years, my major project has involved studying the Modern Alliterative Revival in speculative poetry, a little-known movement that takes the medieval alliterative meter as its guiding light. Given that most readers for Tales after Tolkien are medievalists, I’m sure many of us can name at least a few modern alliterative poets without thinking too hard about it. Ezra Pound rapidly comes to mind, plus Auden and, of course, Tolkien. Other suggestions might include C. S. Lewis, Richard Wilbur, and John Myers Myers. Still, as I started diving into the archives and so forth, I began to realize that modern alliterative verse was more widespread than just these usual suspects – in fact, for certain poets interested in science fiction, fantasy, horror, or the Weird, an affinity for alliterative poetics has become especially noticeable.

The book, cover image
provided by Wise

So naturally I did what any academic would do after stumbling upon an “underground” literary movement – I assembled a book: Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival: A Critical Anthology (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2024).

The anthology is called “critical” because, besides collecting together 55 alliterative poets (many never formally published), I also provide a full academic argument that explains the shape and contours of the Modern Alliterative Revival. The curious can check out the anthology itself, but for this blog series, I thought it would be fun to simply take a step back and chat about the revival’s fascinating array of poems and poets. After all, the Modern Revival is heavily eclectic. Some poets are academics; others never went to university. The traditions covered span Old English, Middle English, Old Norse, and more, and whereas some poets care deeply about historical authenticity, others merely want some medieval flavoring. And how many anthologies can boast a translation from Old High German by the libertarian economist who first formulated a theory of anarcho-capitalism (hint: David Friedman), or a dual-language original poem from a woman who decided spur-of-the-moment – while in her 40s – to learn Old English on her own? (Answer: Mary K. Savelli.) Not many anthologies, folks; not many.

The Modern Revival is filled with such tales, and now that the anthology has seen the light of day, I’m quickly discovering even more. So I’d like to dedicate this blog series to the new writers of “Rum Ram Ruf,” as Chaucer once called it – the poets of the Modern Alliterative Revival.

One caution. Although I won’t get super technical, I do upon occasion like to geek out about metrics, especially if a poem does something cool … so metrics are fair game. I’m hoping a few casual references to Sievers types or whatnot won’t send anyone screaming for the doors, but if you’d like a refresher, let me recommend Paul Douglas Deane’s guide on Forgotten Ground Regained, the absolute best website now dedicated to modern alliterative verse.

That said, for my inaugural discussion, who’s ready to see the first genre poem ever published in an alliterative meter? Everyone? Good!

Fair warning, though: it’s fairly flimsy.

The Roaring Trumpet” (Unknown Fantasy Fiction, May 1940)

The source; image provided
by Wise

So, surprisingly, the honor of the first published alliterative speculative poem belongs to...not Tolkien. Maybe. Honestly the matter’s somewhat ambiguous. Although Tolkien started writing alliterative verse in the 1920s, his most recognizable alliterative texts from his legendarium – for instance, The Lay of the Children of Húrin – never saw print during his lifetime. So that just leaves early published work like “Obituary for Henry Bradley” (1923) and “Doworst” (1933), neither of which are remotely fantastic. There are also two more texts of unclear genre, “Iúmonna Gold Galdre Bewunden” (1923) and “The Nameless Land” (1927). The former is a metrical hybrid, later revised as “The Hoard,” whose title derives from a line in Beowulf, and the latter – despite its reference to the hidden Elvish city of “Gondobar,” i.e., Gondolin – actually classifies as an Old Irish immran; it even names Tir-nan-Og. Neither text codes clearly as fantasy, though, except under a significantly broader definition of the term than I’m wont to use.

That leaves the honor of first published speculative poem in the Modern Revival to Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague de Camp, who added several such poems to their comic novella, “The Roaring Trumpet” (May 1940).

I promised flimsiness, however, and flimsiness you shall have. While Pratt no doubt had a flair for languages, I highly doubt Old Icelandic was one of them, despite a later posthumous claim by his younger co-author. The reason? For many of Pratt’s verses in “The Roaring Trumpet,” I’ve tracked down striking similarities to previous translations by Henry Adams Bellows (Elder Edda, 1923) and Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur (Prose Edda, 1916). Granted, Pratt modifies his borrowings slightly, but only slightly, and often just to update archaisms. For instance, Bellows has “care eats the heart if thou canst not speak” (Havámal, verse 121), but Pratt has “care eats the heart if you cannot speak.” So, yeah.

But wait...there are, in fact, some original alliterative lines in “The Roaring Trumpet.” Take the following example. The first two lines hail from Bellows’s Lokasenna (verse 64), but the final two lines, which are thoroughly in character for the Norse God Loki, are pure Pratt:

I say to the gods and the sons of gods
The things that whet my thoughts;
By the wells of the world there is none with the might
To make me do his will.

So there you have it. Not a terribly good or original alliterative poem, mind you, but an alliterative poem nonetheless. Examples such as this one, notably, would later inspire the young Poul Anderson, the most prolific and wide-ranging pulp poet of the Modern Revival.